Site Mobile Navigation

A Quiet Evening, Waiting for the Next Angry Man

The view from a prescreening booth outside the Pentagon where a gunman opened fire on police officers and then was shot and killed.Credit
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

WASHINGTON

A couple of weeks ago, the chief of the little-known police force at the Pentagon warned some of his officers to be vigilant for an “active shooter” — the breath-catching term for an armed individual who appears from nowhere and attacks, with no interest in survival.

It just seemed to the chief, Richard Keevill, that these kinds of troubling incidents were increasing. The Army doctor who opened fire at Fort Hood. The man who flew a plane into the Internal Revenue Service offices in Austin. The professor who killed three colleagues in Alabama because she had been denied tenure.

“We’ve had so damned many of them,” Chief Keevill, of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, said the other day. “It’s like the crime du jour. Someone becomes disgruntled with the government and decides to take it out with a gun.”

The chief delivered his heads-up and the days passed, melting finally into another late-winter Thursday at the Pentagon. The sun had dropped, the evening rush had waned, and, a few dozen yards from the entrance, a man lingered. Bearded and neatly dressed, he was concealing two handguns, many rounds of ammunition, and a consuming resentment.

Here was our next active shooter, mentally disturbed and with an anger that had metastasized into a justification to attack the Government, often the catch-all phrase for the oppressor, the deceiver, the denier of dreams. In this view, it seems, the Government is made of paper, concrete and whispers.

The arrows on the signs above him pointed this way and that, for the buses and trains that serve the region’s busiest transit hub, right beside the Pentagon. Instead he followed the arrows pointing to a Pentagon entrance, where Government police officers of flesh and blood stood outside.

Here were Officer Marvin Carraway Jr. and Officer Colin Richards, standing behind portable bulletproof shields that were not as formidable as their official name — “ballistic barrier” — might suggest. Armed with Glock semiautomatic pistols, they had spent the last several hours checking the badges of Pentagon employees entering the complex.

A few yards away stood Officer Jeffery Amos, an UMP-40 submachine gun in his hands. His right forefinger rested on the weapon’s trigger guard.

While the approaching man wore magazines of bullets under his collared shirt and blazer, these officers wore bulletproof vests under their dark uniforms. Each also wore the gold badge that distinguished them as guardians of the pentagonal mini-city that receives 25,000 people a day.

Photo

Officers Marvin Carraway Jr., top, Jeffery Amos and Colin Richards were on duty. Officers Carraway and Amos were injured.Credit
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

The growing complexity of our times is reflected in the history of the agency that employs these officers. Just 40 years ago, officers known as “special policemen” — glorified watchmen, really — protected the military nerve center of the world’s most powerful country. But as demonstrations and bomb threats increased, more serious law enforcement operations evolved.

Then a hijacked airplane pierced the Pentagon during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, killing scores of people. Several months later, defense officials created the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, whose expanded mission is to provide “force protection against a full spectrum of potential threats.”

Consider, for a moment, the Pentagon. “This is a small city that happens to be a national icon,” Steven E. Calvery, the agency’s director, said. “And the national military command post while we wage two wars.”

Still, when not screening visitors, checking badges or patrolling the grounds, the agency’s 700 uniformed officers are constantly warding against the seduction of monotony — of glazing over badges and faces.

Now here came another unassuming man — a defense employee working late, perhaps, or a tourist — walking the dimly lighted sidewalk along the tan wall of the Pentagon.

Officer Carraway saw him first. They exchanged no words, though the veteran officer recognized in the man’s eyes a clear shout of intent: to do bodily harm.

Things happened fast and yet slow, at least in memory. The man, standing five feet away. Raising not a badge but a gun. Pointing at Officer Carraway’s face. Discharging.

Officer Carraway, 44, is a husband, a father, and a Pittsburgh Steelers fan who likes to fish. He spent several years seeing the world, including Kuwait City, thanks to the Marines and Operation Desert Storm. He has worked as a security officer at American University, as an information technology consultant and, for the last 15 months, as a P.F.P.A. officer.

All this was now fodder for a possible obituary, as Officer Carraway, also known as Marvin and Dad, heard bullets zip past his head. He took cover behind his ballistic barrier, thinking that he might have been hit, but thinking too: This man cannot succeed; he has to be stopped.

The active shooter continued toward the entrance to the Government. But Officer Carraway, the man the shooter had left for dead, drew his Glock and began firing.

Photo

The Pentagon Force Protection Agency, shown at a roll call, was formed in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks.Credit
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Officer Richards, meanwhile, had tumbled out of the way. He is 29 and single; exuberantly unattached. He was sitting in a college classroom in Florida when the airplane hit the Pentagon, and now here he was, protecting the Pentagon, not quite believing what was happening, thinking about his parents — and about Marvin, his colleague.

He too began to fire his gun, as did another officer, who had been working inside a prescreening booth. Pop-pop-pop.

Officer Amos, 46, is a husband, a father of three — the youngest a girl of 5 — and a product of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. He served in Kuwait with the Air Force Reserves during the first Gulf War, then worked for 11 years as a police officer in New Orleans, where he patrolled broken neighborhoods in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

His own house, in New Orleans East, took on five feet of water, while the homes of his relatives in the Lower Ninth Ward were destroyed. Aunty’s house; gone. Gramma’s house; gone.

Four years ago, Officer Amos and his family moved to the Washington area, where he landed a job a year ago as an officer with the P.F.P.A. Hair gone gray. Had never in his career fired a weapon in the line of duty. And now a bearded man with a look and a gun was coming his way.

At first Officer Amos did not have a clear shot, because right behind the armed shooter was his colleague, Officer Carraway, with whom he had just been planning a fishing trip out of Chesapeake Bay. But his would-be fishing partner moved out of the way, and Officer Amos fired his submachine gun.

The active shooter went down, knocking into a metal railing.

Shot in the head and arm, he would die hours later in a hospital. His name was John Patrick Bedell. He was 36, very much loved by his parents and siblings, and profoundly troubled. It is said that he believed the Government was behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

The incident lasted less than a minute. But the aftermath has lingered, with reports and interviews and assessments. Everyone agrees, though, that the officers responded impeccably. Their extensive training had paid off.

Officer Amos, who was bullet-grazed in the right shoulder and bicep, struggled to sleep that first night, though he slept like a baby the next. But Officer Carraway, who was nicked in the left thigh, found sleep more elusive.

“Every time I closed my eyes,” he said, “I’d see his face.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 15, 2010, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: A Quiet Evening, Waiting for the Next Angry Man. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe